A very fine Italian house

One afternoon in the middle of September, I stepped off a train onto the rain-slicked streets of this sleepy, well-kept town 25 miles northwest of Venice. After dashing for three blocks through a howling, late-summer storm, I found myself face to face with the house that arguably has had a broader, more lasting influence on American residential architecture than any other single building: the Villa Cornaro, built beginning in 1553 and designed by Andrea Palladio, who was born in Padua exactly 500 years ago today.

Looking back in my direction from atop a broad sweep of stone steps was the piece of architecture that inspired Thomas Jefferson’s first stab at a design for Monticello, helped give the White House its projecting North Portico, and has since inspired thousands of ambitious designs in subdivisions across America -- including, in recent years, enough McMansions to fill a good-sized suburb. This was the one Palladian villa I’d always planned but hadn’t yet been able to visit; it was also, I hoped, one that might shed some useful light on the complexities of architectural influence, and maybe explain why the very idea of appropriation is more fraught in architecture than in any other art form.

If a sculptor, filmmaker or composer is talented enough to produce a group of acolytes, or creates a style that seems irresistibly easy to crib, it hardly matters if the resulting copies are clumsy. An unsuccessful stab at Jackson Pollock-style action painting never did anybody any harm. A terrible Hemingway-esque novel can be stashed benignly on the bottom shelf.

But bad copies of brilliant buildings never disappear, at least not without the help of a wrecking crew, and they can’t very easily be camouflaged or tucked out of sight. And when you consider that the vast majority of structures that go up in our cities every year are not designed by professionals -- and are therefore invented completely by means of indirect influence, with contractors often relying on blueprints that are already copies of copies -- you begin to realize that the act of architectural borrowing, in the wrong hands, can be a pretty destructive force.

Few architects have been as widely, energetically or crudely copied as Palladio. His outsized legacy is partly thanks to the clear, graceful appeal of his designs for villas and churches, but has more to do with the fact that he produced the famous pattern book in architectural history, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, or the Four Books on Architecture. It explained in uncompromising but patient prose how to apply the details and proportions of classical architecture to new construction. It also included a much-studied illustration of the Villa Cornaro.

First published in 1570 in Italian, and later in a number of translations, the Four Books made their way into the libraries of English earls, Scottish architects and our own Thomas Jefferson, ensuring that the Palladian style would become the foundation for aspirational house design in Britain and then, by the middle of the 18th century, in America. James Gibbs and other British architects used Palladian formulas as the basis for their own pattern books, which were widely copied by American designers and builders. Palladianism in this country, in other words, was strongly diluted from the start.

By the time a competition came around to design a residence for the American president, in 1792, elite Washington circles were full of Palladio fans. Jefferson, who referred to the Quattro Libri as his “Bible” and understood Palladio better than any American architect of his day, submitted an anonymous entry that was full of references to La Rotonda, his hero’s hilltop masterpiece in Vicenza. (Since he helped organize the competition, it would have been awkward for him to enter officially.) Most of the rooms in James Hoban’s winning design had rooms with perfect Palladian dimensions -- except, significantly, the Oval Office, whose form appears nowhere in the Four Books and was likely taken from Inigo Jones. In 1829, Hoban added a double-height portico to the northern facade that is an updated, streamlined version of the one fronting the Villa Cornaro by way of Gibbs.

Powerful legacy

When architectural historians explore the implications of the misguided homage, they tend to focus on the damage done to cities by followers of Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other 20th century pioneers. It’s not difficult to understand why: Copying a daring Modernist has often meant not only stripping your building of ornament and giving it a flat roof but also setting it apart from the city, even if the result is a noticeable tear in the urban fabric. The Music Center on Bunker Hill, to pick a local example, has unfortunate echoes of Miesian ambition not just in the forms of its architecture but in the way its campus of buildings stands aloof from the life of the street below.

But the Palladian legacy has been arguably just as powerful in shaping America’s built environment, particularly in its residential neighborhoods. If leading Modernists inspired mostly other architects, Palladio has had a notably populist influence over the centuries, lending ideas to developers, contractors and thousands upon thousands of average home buyers.

Other Renaissance architects before Palladio, most notably Brunelleschi and Alberti, revived classical Roman details and applied them to churches and civic buildings. Palladio’s most important breakthrough was in taking the forms of a Roman temple and using them in residential architecture, giving for the first time an imposing and nearly civic grandeur to the single-family house. That one idea -- the house as temple, keeping up with the Joneses by making the columns on your portico as grand as theirs -- has since the 18th century been irresistible to a certain ambitious slice of the American home-buying and house-building public.

In the 16th century Veneto, Palladio helped popularize the notion of a stately country house as a place of refuge and relaxation for moneyed families in Venice and other cities. In America, Palladianism has found its way into a wide range of public buildings spanning more than three centuries. To name just three, these include Peter Harrison’s 1749 Redwood Library in Newport, R.I., McKim Mead and White’s Morgan Library in New York of 1906 and, more ironically, Robert Venturi’s Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton, which was finished in 1983 and included a prominent Palladian window. But mostly what Palladianism helped popularize in America is the idea that there is nothing contradictory about the notion of a castle, surrounded by a good quarter-acre of lawn and a driveway big enough to hold five or six cars, for a middle-class family.

Palladio was trained as a stonemason before he reinvented himself as a master architect, and a trip to Rome in 1541 gave him the chance to study, with an obsessive’s mastery of detail, the classical models that had inspired him. Thanks in large part to his unusually varied resume, his villas possess not just the forms of a Roman temple but also their persuasive sense of physical power, an elegance that paradoxically enough is also forceful and unyielding. This in the end may be the biggest problem with bad copies of Palladian houses in this country: not so much their disharmony or lack of fidelity to the Four Books as their essential flimsiness.

A projecting portico

As the rain continued to beat down on Piombino Dese, I stepped under the awning of a little shop and looked more closely at the front of the Villa Cornaro, which sits well back from the street and is protected from the sidewalk by a high wall. Palladio designed the villa -- which is now owned by a couple from Atlanta, Carl and Sally Gable -- near the midpoint of his long and unusually productive career, just as he was making a transition from residential work to grander public commissions in Vicenza, where he lived and worked, and later in Venice, where his canal-front churches remain dominant presences on the skyline.

As the Gables point out in their 2005 book about living in the house, “Palladian Days,” its design advertises many of the hallmarks of the architect’s talent, beginning with a stately but imposing exterior looming over the visitor, with a projecting double portico facing what has now become a fairly busy street.

Eventually, I walked up the steps and stepped inside the raised main floor, or piano nobile, which is organized with a square, high-ceilinged grand salon at the center and a number of smaller, frescoed rooms radiating out around it. Sally Gable, who was presiding over the house’s weekly opening hours, showed me around for a few minutes, and pretty soon her husband appeared as well: a pair of American Southerners who have become obsessed with Palladio’s architecture, bringing the circle of influence neatly back to its source.

On the train back to Venice, it occurred to me that the problem of architectural influence has entered a new phase in recent years, with the advent of the computer rendering. The browser has become a more powerful version of the pattern book. Young architects can study dozens of new buildings around the world with a few clicks of the mouse.

If they have an architectural bible, to return to Jefferson’s example, it is not a literal publication but a constantly updated, ever-shifting collection of digital images -- renderings of proposed buildings by famous and emerging firms alike, published online and within minutes seen, absorbed and debated by architects and critics around the world. The Palladio for our times is not a single architect or even a single style but the idea, and promise, of newness itself.

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christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com